Laura Gilpin
[Photographer, b. 1891, Austin Bluffs, Colorado, d. 1979, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]

 What I consider really fine landscapes are very few and far between. I consider this field one of the greatest challenges and it is the principal reason I live in the west. I... am willing to drive many miles, expose a lot of film, wait untold hours, camp out to be somewhere at sunrise, make many return trips to get what I am after. (1956) 
 The romance of the old West vanished so fast and so few ever did anything with it. Does it make you realize the importance of Art and how the main knowledge of history is through Art alone? 
 Every great work of art is fundamentally a fine design in its arrangement of light and dark, of line and form. All of us are sensitive to this, some of [us] consciously, some unconsciously. The photographer can arrange his picture just as the painter does, only sometimes he must go about it in a different way. (1928) 
 I live a lonely photographic life here in Santa Fe. I do see Eliot Porter occasionally, and Ansel storms through every so often, otherwise I plug along in my old fashioned way.